Whale watching in South Africa

It was perhaps inevitable that Jessamy Calkin’s son would grow up with a
fascination inspired by his name. In South Africa he finally got to see the
creature that swallowed his namesake at close quarters.

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A southern right whale lobtailingPhoto: JESSAMY CALKIN

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Jonah dips a toe in at Nanny's BeachPhoto: JESSAMY CALKIN

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Benches for whale-watchers are conveniently located near HermanusPhoto: JESSAMY CALKIN

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Seals on Geyser RockPhoto: JESSAMY CALKIN

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Jonah spots another whale, this time at De KeldersPhoto: JESSAMY CALKIN

'Hank Williams was an alcoholic who died of heart failure in the back of a Cadillac when he was only 29. I don’t want to name our son after him.’

We settle into moody silence.

'All right then – Jonah,’ Ralf says.

So we called our son Jonah. It was our fallback name, the one we both agreed on; it was the name we had been going to call his sister, born five years earlier, had she been a boy. But I had faint echoes of concern. There were notions of bad luck attached to the name, especially in seafaring circles (my father was in the Navy). In fact, Jonah is associated with being a bringer of bad luck. According to the Bible, having been called by God to go to Nineveh and preach, Jonah shirked in his duty and ran away and hid. He boarded a ship, which was immediately blighted by storms. The sailors, thinking that Jonah had brought them bad luck, tossed him overboard, where he was promptly swallowed by a whale. He stayed in the belly of the whale for three days and nights, until God took pity on him and told the whale to spit him out. Then Jonah did as he was told and took the degenerate Ninevites to task.

When he was three, my son Jonah used to have a plastic whale that he would play with in the bath, and I would tell him this story, which he was fascinated by. He wanted to see a whale up close, and so did I.

I waited until he was nine. We chose South Africa: it is warm, it is beautiful, and from June to November it has up to 170 southern right whales and their babies languishing off the coastline of Walker Bay. You can see them from your balcony, I was assured. The southern right whale is a gentle, bulbous creature that grows up to 56ft long and weighs between 40 and 80 tons. Somewhat poignantly, it was named the right whale because it was considered the 'right’ whale to hunt. It was the first whale to be hunted, but having been rendered almost extinct by the 1930s, it was also the first to be protected. A ban was put in place in 1935 (initially massively abused by the Soviet Union and the Americans) and it is now a conservation success story: the numbers have increased to an estimated 10,000 – still only a small percentage of its original figure but growing by seven per cent each year. Right whales feed in the Antarctic, then swim to South Africa to mate and have their babies; they have also been seen off the coasts of Argentina, Australia, South America, Madagascar and New Zealand. Their cousins, the northern rights, have not fared so well: fewer than 400 remain in the northern Atlantic.

Birkenhead Villas near the town of Hermanus looks over Walker Bay, on the Danger Point peninsula, a couple of hours from Cape Town. Hermanus has the most sparkling, magnificent, relatively unsung coastline, like the best bits of southern Cornwall, but with sun and whales. Rugged and rocky, it has hidden sandy bays, miles of painterly waves, a coastal path that takes you to cove after immaculate cove, and the softest sand, which Jonah declared to be 'like cashmere’. Birkenhead Villas – which is expensive, but also one of the loveliest hotels I’ve ever stayed in – has only six rooms (neighbouring Birkenhead House has more, though doesn’t accept children under 12). From my balcony we could see the sea and – thar she blows – the distinctive V-shaped spout of spray. Our first whale. 'OMD!’ Jonah said (which stands for 'Oh My Days’, a kind of south London primary school version of OMG).

Despite having got off the plane so recently, we were keen to go straight back up in the air for a whale-spotting flight. Right whales have 40 per cent fat, which means they float close to the surface. If you’re on a boat or the shore, you see only a bit of them – a fluke, an eye, a fin or, if you’re lucky, the whale breaching. To get the full impact of their size, the most thrilling way to see them is from the air. Near Birkenhead is Stanford Hills Estate, which exports proteas and produces wine. It is also the home of African Wings, or rather, where Evan Austin leases a hangar and runway. We pulled up at what looked like a house with a plane parked in the garden. A group of people was gathered around a car on which wine bottles were placed – there was a wine-tasting going on. Austin – not one of the tasters, I hasten to add – strode forward to shake our hands, then said, 'Come over to the check-in desk,’ and got us to sign disclaimers on the bonnet of the car. Austin grew up on a farm in Pretoria. His father was a part-time flying instructor and they would fly to neighbouring countries every holiday; sometimes he would bunk off school on Fridays to spend the weekend in a camp they had in the Okavango Delta. He got his pilot’s licence on his 17th birthday and has been up in the air virtually every day since.

We climbed into the Cessna 175. Jonah was deputised as the co-pilot and sat next to Austin; I sat in the back. Rearing up over the bay we could see several whales in the sea below us – usually females with babies but occasionally three together, their vast bulks clearly outlined in the water. Whales, whales everywhere. It was spectacular.

We buzzed around for ages until Jonah, who had been casually informed that he would be landing the plane, became impatient to return. On the way back Austin entertained us by demonstrating the concept of weightlessness, which involves climbing steeply up in the air and then suddenly dropping down so that your stomach remains hovering. It is a peculiar feeling. My son successfully landed the plane and the backrush blew the wineglasses off the bonnet of Austin’s car. 'My wife will kill me if they’re broken,’ he said.

Early the next morning, Jonah was having a cup of tea on the balcony of our room wielding a huge pair of binoculars and wearing a complimentary silk kimono. 'Mummy! You missed the first whale of the day!’ he called. We had a splendid breakfast outside served by Stix and Sheasby, who glided around bearing exotic fruit, scrambled eggs and coffee. The day’s whale-watching plan was centred on a trip in a boat to Dyer Island to see the jackass penguins. You can get pretty close to the whales on a boat.

On the way to Kleinbaai harbour we passed a baboon, crouching casually by the side of the road under a gum tree. (Mbonisi, our driver, made baboon noises the rest of the way.) At the harbour we gathered round for a briefing on the lifestyle of the southern right: we would also see seals and penguins and probably some great white sharks, but we would be unlikely to see any dolphins as there is no resident pod. 'The whales have eaten all the dolphins, have they?’ asked an American, with genuine concern. In fact the whales eat nothing but krill – up to two tons a day – which they filter through their baleen, and do their feeding in the Antarctic (where there’s a high concentration of krill). Their calves, which are 16ft long and weigh over a ton when they’re born, feed from the mothers for eight to nine months.

We were given the lowdown on the jackass penguins by a lady called Claudine, who looked exactly like a penguin herself. The penguins are resident on parts of the coast, particularly Dyer Island, where their numbers have declined from 23,000 breeding pairs to 1,600 in the past 30 years because all the guano has been taken off the island for fertiliser. It used to be 20ft deep and was used by the penguins for shelter from the sun and for nesting. If they go in the water to keep cool instead, the gulls will eat their eggs and their young. So, Claudine said, we must build them little houses made of fibreglass – which of course I was only too happy to contribute to at £30 a pop.

The boat took about 20 people, and we arranged ourselves in position for optimum whale-watching. Standing on its top deck gave us a peerless view of the bay. About five minutes past Pearly Beach there was a splash and a blow, and we spotted our first whale. We drew up quietly. It is a very affecting experience to see them so close. Whales are older than man; their very presence undermines you. There was a group of them in a sort of huddle – they like to stroke each other. Despite their vastness, the southern rights are sensual creatures.

I was riveted to discover that their skin is so sensitive they can feel the pressure of a human finger.

Further out we arrived at Geyser Rock, populated by a multitude of seals, zipping in and out of the water like dolphins, sleekly splurged all over the rocks, climbing on top of each other – a writhing, hopping mass – 60,000 of them. And an overwhelming smell that forced us all to hold our noses and gag. ('It smelt like a million wees, Daddy,’ Jonah said on the phone to his father that evening. 'Ancient ones,’ he added cheerfully.) We passed a boat with tourists being lowered into the water in cages attached to the side, wearing wet suits and looking faintly terrified, as tuna on the end of a line was tossed into the sea as bait for the great white sharks that circled under the water.

Back at Birkenhead I lay on the sand at Nanny Beach (so called because in apartheid days it was where nannies were allowed to swim) and read Philip Hoare’s masterful book Leviathan, a poignant homage to the whale, to its supernatural vastness and intelligence, to its otherworldliness. As Hoare says, 'They are not so much animal as geographical; if they did not move, it would be difficult to believe they were alive at all.’ I read with fascination about the sperm whale, that strange-looking beast with a huge square head full of oil, massively hunted in the last century. It boasts the biggest brain of any creature ever alive, weighing as much as 19lb (a human brain weighs about 3lb). It is a slow breeder, and by the end of worldwide whaling, nearly three quarters of all sperm whales had been killed for their oil, reducing a population of more than a million in 1712 to 360,000 by the end of the 20th century. 'It is one of the cruellest aspects of its historical fate that this most hunted of whales is built for a long life,’ Hoare writes, 'a longevity indicated by the slow beating of its huge heart at 10 times a minute; a shrew, whose heart beats 1,000 times in a minute, lives for just a year.’ The book paints a harrowing picture of whale-hunting, and of the mobile abattoirs that the whale ships became. I was in tears at one point. 'If the whales had been able to scream, they say, no one would have been able to bear their work. Instead the whales were rendered dumb in the face of destruction, as if they agreed not to protest against their abuse the more to shame their persecutors.’

Early the next morning I went for a grand coastal walk. The path to Hermanus meanders along past empty beaches, cove after cove, some sandy, some rocky, some shelly. Layers of little waves rolling in, shallow spumes of white foam in the endless blueness, sea melding into sky. Streams and wooded areas speckled with flowers. And, not far out, there were whales, lots of whales, and helpful benches from which to contemplate them.

After a couple of days in the blissful bosom of Birkenhead, we moved up the coast to Grootbos near Gansbaai. This is a private nature reserve owned by Michael Lutzeyer, a man with a passion for the conservation of the rather extraordinary environment in which he lives. Literally, Grootbos means 'great bush’ and is located in an area of vegetation found only on the Cape. Our accommodation (we stayed in Forest Lodge, you can also stay in Garden Lodge) was in one of the largest milkwood forests in the world. We reached our suite via a long path that twisted and turned through the 100-year-old milkwood trees, which look like they’ve been drafted by Arthur Rackham. Everything is eco-friendly but there are no solar panels, I noticed (solar power has been slow to arrive in South Africa). There is a large central lodge with a dining-room and bar, where you can plan your stay, choosing from a range of activities such as hiking, horse-riding and cave-exploring.

We decided on a coastal whale-watching walk that ended up in Klipgat Cave, first excavated in 1969 by the late Frank Schweitzer of the South African Museum, who discovered 2,000-year-old pieces of pots discarded among the stone and bone artifacts and ornaments, and remains of the fish, shellfish and other animals eaten in the cave campsite. In deeper deposits he uncovered human teeth and remains left there by Stone Age people some 40,000 to 80,000 years ago.

Jonah, tiring of the archaeological explanations by our earnest guide, drew my attention to a commotion going on in the bay. A whale gangbang appeared to be taking place: they were thrashing and blowing and making their strange baying noise, flippers and flukes poking up everywhere. When whales mate, sometimes one male will hold the female in position, sometimes he chases other whales away, sometimes they’re all at it. According to Hoare, it becomes 'a sperm competition in which males assert their supremacy by multiple matings rather than fighting for favours; females will even permit more than one partner to enter them at the same time after sessions of delicate foreplay in which the courting animals use their flippers to stroke each other.’ (This would explain why the testicles of a male right whale weigh nearly half a ton.) Jonah was enthralled.

Back at Grootbos we made the most of our exquisite little cabin with its private plunge pool surrounded by bush. Jonah was very amused by the sign exhorting us not to put 'foreign objects’ down the loo, a term he hadn’t come across before. 'Does that mean you can only put South African things down it?’ he asked. We wandered through the tangled milkwood corridor to the main lodge for a very fine supper, hot and sour tom yum soup followed by venison, then played Scrabble in front of the fire before bed.

The major vegetation type found only in this botanical region of Africa is called fynbos. The following day we spent an edifying couple of hours

on a plant safari with our guide, Chomani, who explained the Cape flora to us. It was a glorious morning, rattling around in a 4x4, Jonah clutching his bunch of plant specimens and Chomani pointing out bushmen sweets, soldiers in the box, butterfly bush and a tiny pink chrysanthemum. Two years ago there was a fire that destroyed half

the lodge and its land, but afterwards many more species appeared. Chomani explained that fire is the driving force for this kind of vegetation; the heat in the earth forced up new growth. There are now 742 species of plants and wildflowers there. Apart from the milkwoods, there are no other trees – they are not suited to the sandy soil, which gives the landscape a curiously bereft quality.

Chomani is a graduate of Grootbos’s education foundation, Green Futures. Twelve students a year are carefully picked from the local township for a three-year horticultural course – in an area of 50 per cent unemployment the competition is tough; students are paid a basic wage and given food, uniform and equipment. Their course includes practical 'life skills’ – how to drive, use the internet, how to use a cash machine – and most go on to be horticulturalists or rangers. Two each year are picked to visit the Eden Project in Cornwall, most of them having never left the Cape before. To date no student has failed to graduate or to find a job afterwards. There is also a flourishing vegetable garden situated on the reserve, lots of hens (all produce going to the lodge), and a vegetable-growing initiative for local single mothers – they get lessons and their own vegetable plot, tools and uniform.

Our focus was whales, and before we left the coast we went out on a second boat trip: this time the whales were more obliging about how close we could get. We saw for the first time a whale breaching – spectacularly – forcing itself up out of the water and crashing back down again. Some believe it is an attempt to rid themselves of parasites that cling to them. We got only a few feet away from a mother and her calf. The mother rolled on her back with her flippers poking up, exposing a creamy Friesian cow-patterned belly. At one point she turned on to her side and Jonah and I, leaning over the side of the boat, found ourselves looking directly into her eye. I thought of Paul Watson, the eco militant who captains the Sea Shepherd, and what he said was the turning point in his life, and the beginning of his fight to save the whales: 'As the whale slid back into the water we saw his eye, which was the size of a dinner plate, and in that whale’s eye I saw recognition, compassion, empathy and understanding. Something passed between us and it changed my life for ever.’

We moved to Cape Town. I hated to leave the whales behind but the heady landscape of the Cape made up for it. Our hotel was the 12 Apostles, named after the 12 peaks of the mountain range behind it. I wanted to walk along Camps Bay and swim in the 11C sea, and we were taken there by a couple of enterprising sisters who have formed a company called Holiday Nanny. If you want to go off for the day without your children, wine-tasting, say, they will pick them up from your hotel and take them on various outings – to the beach, to the 'scratch patch’ where they can find semi-precious stones. It’s not expensive and they were great: they took us to the beguiling Boulders Beach, where we saw more jackass penguins and some of their new little fibreglass houses in action, and to World of Birds, a cheerful place full of vivid and slightly pompous birds. Missing the whales, we went to the aquarium. There were some pleasingly peculiar fish there and they addressed the issue of conservation and education in a very accessible manner: tanks of local fish and a number you can text or call if you’re in the fish market and need to know if what you’re buying is sustainable or not. We watched an ad for the 'Rethink the Shark’ campaign – a Jaws-style clip of people having fun on the beach until a shark’s fin is spotted, whereupon they all flee, screaming. Close up, the fin reveals itself to be a toaster floating in the sea, with the caption, '791 people were killed by defective toasters last year. Four were killed by sharks.’

The truth is that up to 100 million sharks are killed every year. Next to this, the figure of 2-3,000 great whales, plus 50,000 smaller cetaceans from hunting looks slight – but bear in mind that there is a worldwide moratorium on whaling (virtually worldwide – all countries signed up except Norway and Iceland, which opted out, and there is a small amount of aboriginal subsistence hunting). Japan pretended to comply but in fact the Japanese hunt whales at will, claiming it is for scientific research. But there are other causes of cetacean death: 300,000 killed by chemical pollution (passed on by mother’s milk), being snared as bycatch, and even skin cancer caused by the thinning ozone layer.

Back home we pinned up postcards of southern rights and I contacted Philip Hoare, who told me, over a whale-worshipping lunch, about the theories of the biologist Dr Hal Whitehead: that sperm whales have not only evolved elaborate social systems but that it is possible they have also developed their own religion.

When Jonah was eight months old he had a serious accident; he suffered a massive brain haemorrhage after falling off the bed on to a wooden floor. He nearly died; his father and I were subsequently accused of causing his injuries by shaking him. He was taken away from us and it took five months to get him home and another year and numerous court cases to sort it out. After that, I felt differently about his name and its connotations. I felt that Jonah had been in the belly of the whale. He had survived. And, as the alchemists used to say, he had seen 'many mysteries’ there.